One of Master Wildman’s early efforts, a tragedy entitled Vortigern, is described as ‘readily recognisable as having been planned upon a Shakespearian model’. Craven House is recognisably planned upon a Dickensian model, which allows for irrepressible bursts of stage cockney and solemn facetiousness. But Hamilton had clearly read Wells’s early comedies too, and even the most over-egged comic or sentimental scenes harbour odd flashes of astringency. The explanation of Audrey the parlour-maid’s fascination with the parrot, for example, is that the bird is ‘the sole living creature she could meet on equal terms, and to any extent assert her own personality with’, which is funny, but also faintly dreadful, as well as being a grim little eye-opener into some of the realities of 1920s servant-girl life.

It takes several close readings of a Hamilton novel to establish just how bizarre his characters are, how acute is the ear trained on their self-absorbed, repetitive chatter, how authentic are his portrayals of a social landscape flat to the point of drabness, but wanting only a grotesque set-piece to drag it out of kilter. Simultaneously an apprentice work of great charm and a high-grade period ornament from the era of Warwick Deeping and J. B. Priestley, Craven House is also, in one or two of its bleaker moments, ominously mature.

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